Copernic : Java Glossary

The advantages include:

• Very rapid indexing.
• Unlike Google Desktop it indexes all the files it is supposed to.
• It indexes videos, pictures, emails — all manner of files.
• You can search by folder, filename, keyword contents, extension, class of file etc.
• It uses a special windows hook to instantly detect changed files. It does not need to periodically scan the entire disk to find them.
• It is able to index emails individually.
• It lets you know exactly what file it is working on when indexing.
• It allows complex searches with AND (+), OR, NOT (-), wildcards (*), parentheses, quotes (for exact match of phrase), NEAR. By default, it insists on all words being present.
• It integrates with the Copernic web search engine. The web image search is much better than Google’s. It gives you pictures only of what you ask for.
• When you make a “spelling” mistake in your desktop search, is asks “Did you mean…”, just the way Google does on web searches.
• I am not totally sure of this, but it seems to put priority on getting recently modified files indexed first. This means the index is useful relatively quickly. This can be useful if you stored a file and can’t recall what you called it or what directory you put it in.
• If you tell it to use a drive with more space for the index files, it does not idiotically start indexing from scratch leaving the old indexes behind to clutter your disk. It moves them.
• You can also use it to rapidly find files anywhere on the disk when you know the name. Just put the name in quotes in the filename box. If you only know part of the name, leave off the quotes.

• When it indexes as other programs are using the files, they fight, with the result is often files are corrupted or deleted. I find it best to turn of Copernic indexing when I am running batch processes. If you have the Copernic window open, it waits or only 10 seconds of inactivity before resuming indexing. If it is not open, it waits 10 minutes. I have found it necessary to manually turn off indexing any time I am installing software or running a background batch process, such as expanding HTML macros. I can add commands to my bat files to protect me like this:

  REM Protect an app from Copernic indexing interference
  "F:\Program Files\Copernic Desktop Search - Home\DesktopSearch.exe" /stop_indexing
  
  REM do some critical work that indexing might interfere with
  REM ...
  
  "F:\Program Files\Copernic Desktop Search - Home\DesktopSearch.exe" /start_indexing

• The results are sorted by directory, not goodness of fit. You tend to get swamped by too many hits of only one word in your set.
• When you update files, it instantly deletes the file from its index, so you won’t be able to find it until perhaps an hour later when it has had time to reindex the file. It should keep the old indexing until it has time to reindex the file.
• It works only in Internet Explorer and Firefox. It does not work in my favourite browser Opera. With Opera, Copernic works as a separate program, that will spawn the Opera browser for each page you request to render.
• You can’t turn it off completely without uninstalling it. In fact I could not even turn it off to install a new version, and neither could the installer. I had to uninstall.
• If you exit, and restart, it will not index files that were modified or created during the time it was not running. One trick to get around this is to manually temporarily rename a directory tree then rename it back to trigger a reindex.
• It can be useful to monitor the indexing status to see what files it is indexing. If you see it indexing garbage, e.g. browser cache directories, you can add those directories to its list of do-not-index directories.

They also make a web-based search called Copernic Agent that examines a number of other specialised search engines and combines results. Depending on what you are looking for, it consults about a dozen of the search engines in its much larger list. There are three versions of it. The basic one for home use is free. It is fully functional There is a $50.00 USD personal version and a $60.00 USD professional version. Unlike most search engines you download software to use it that works inside Internet Explorer, but not other browsers. It is a full-blown GUI in its own right. Oddly it does not include the excellent image search you can get by using an ordinary browser.